1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems and, more particularly, to modeling the teaming of network interface controllers (NICs).
2. Background Information
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The complexity of managing information handling systems is increasing as the size, capabilities, and diversity of computer systems and networks increase. As a tool for managing information handling systems, the Common Information Model (CIM) established by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), is a standard that defines interrelated managed elements in an IT environment represented as a common set of objects. DMTF is a not-for-profit, vendor-neutral collaborative body, which is leading the development, adoption and unification of management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise and Internet environments. DMTF is chartered to adopt create and maintain the specifications and technologies that provide management tools which deploy, discover and control management data in a standardized way. CIM is an information model, a conceptual view of the managed environment, which attempts to unify and extend the existing instrumentation and management standards using object-oriented constructs and design. At its core, CIM is comprised of a specification and schema. The CIM specification defines the details for integration with other management models, while the CIM schema provides the actual model descriptions. This schema defines how the managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. The underlying CIM framework, including basic model classes and associations, may be built upon through the use of CIM extensions which may be platform and/or technology specific.
The present disclosure provides a number of extensions to the existing CIM, specifically, several CIM classes and association classes to model NIC teaming and network traffic load balancing. Network interface controllers (NICs) provide physical connections to allow information handling systems (IHSs) to communicate over a network. NIC teaming is a network technology that allows multiple NICs in a system to be grouped together to provide network traffic load balancing, fault tolerance and link aggregation. The teaming functionality may be provided through the intermediate driver in Windows and the operating system (OS) built-in support within Linux through channel bonding. In Windows, NIC teaming may utilize the intermediate driver to group physical controllers into a team acting as a single virtual adapter or controller.
Multiple Vendor Teaming (MVT) may not always be supported under Windows, particularly in the case where the teaming feature uses proprietary intermediate drivers. In the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) System Management Work Group (SMWG), there are four profiles designed to model NIC related components and functionalities including Ethernet Port/Network Port Profile, IP Interface Profile, DHCP Client Profile and DNS Client Profile. However, no current profile relates to NIC teaming, therefore resulting in a lack of standard across multiple vendors in NIC teaming.
The problem with MVT may also exist with regard to non-proprietary features. For example, Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is another advanced feature to support the balancing of received network traffic using multiple receive buffers, Deferred Procedure Queues, and logic CPUs with the introduction of hyper-threading technology (HIT) and multi-core OPUs. When the NICs are teamed together with different RSS settings the entire team may normally function with RSS disabled even if only one NIC has RSS disabled. There is no way for the teaming model to detect the current advanced feature settings of the team and intelligently change those settings to take advantage the advance features of all the members in a NIC team.
As another example, different vendors may offer different teaming algorithms. Therefore, and there is no standard or policy to dynamically adjust and apply different algorithms for different situations to optimize an algorithm for a particular situation.
The development of a standard NIC teaming protocol may allow for the teaming of NICs from different vendors. Consequently, such a standard may permit the realization of performance gains and the utitization of advanced features from the different vendors in a NIC team.